Tiny Treats to Pass the Time

I’ve been playing around with these space ships made out of simple shapes, many in sketch form, but I thought I would try one in 3D. How hard could it be? Well, I would find out that my 3D knowledge is still very rudimentary. The music is a brief chorus from Britten’s Billy Budd, which I discovered in Claire Denis’ film, Beau Travail.

Went for a bike ride and got stopped by a train. I waited and thought I would film it. Long train.

I wanted to riff on the idea of some very simple premise to start with and see what kind of progression I could create, and so I thought, circles are very simple and easy to mess around with. I got as far as this storyboard exploration and the energy sort of petered out. I may pick this one up again in the future, but for now, this quick little exploration is the extent of this post....

This began as a simple thought experiment which went something like, can I create any sort of story like movement with a simple count up from one to ten? I decided to keep any animation extremely basic and try to create any effects just with the numbers themselves and the way they were laid out. When I was done with the overall animation, I added sound. I’m not sure there is anything like a “story” here, but I am interested in the ways that sound added so much to this piece....

More heads in glass containers for your Sunday pleasure. I’m starting to explore how to manipulate simple shapes a bit more to add some character to the elements. Just pushing the elements a little bit, ways to give the mouth more expressive qualities, and the nose was made with metaballs which are also new to me.

Just a quick little scene exploring the ways that super simple shapes can create an image.

I started out playing around with a basic head shape, wanting to see about those teeth from yesterday’s sketch. A couple of happy accidents later and this is the result.

Doodling one day, I had this idea for a face, emerging from behind opening doors and all you could see was teeth. I thought, well let’s try this in 3D and see how that goes. I don’t think this quite captures what I wanted to do yet, so I may give this another go tomorrow and see if I can make an improvement.

I had done this little sketch of these two little dudes in a kind of wooden barrel bathtub and thought it might be a good candidate for a little 3D experimentation. Once I had the modelling done, I thought, well, what about a simple camera move from one side to the other, which then suggested (don’t as me why) to me this idea of a ship’s hull creaking. And so, I pulled it together and this is the result....

For today’s entry, I took the image from yesterday’s exploration and gave it a little camera movement and added in sound sound to give it some atmosphere. It was my first time rendering out a very simple animation in Blender, and it turned out to be easier than I thought, though it took about a minute per frame to render. I’ll have to learn a thing or two about how to optimize renders....